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Thursday, April 12, 2018

Is Free Speech Becoming the Next Scare-Quote Domain?

Granted that the plural of anecdote is not "data." Still, I was interested, in reading this first-person account by Josh Blackman of the protests and heckling that greeted his recent visit to CUNY Law School, to see this picture of a tweet from what appears to be the Twitter account of CUNY's National Lawyers Guild chapter:

Note the use of scare-quotes around "free speech." I'm not precisely sure about why it was used here, although Blackman's account suggests that students assumed the speech would be provocation dressed up as free speech but really aimed at getting attention and reaction, in part because the announced subject of the talk was free speech on campus. (Provocation is also free speech, of course, and free speech-as-provocation on and off campus is at least as old as Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman) Actually, Blackman had intended to speak about originalism, he writes, but "the students were not able to find any other professors who were willing to participate in the event," and the subject of the talk was ultimately changed to free speech on campus. No faculty members could be found to participate in that event either, according to the story.

But I'm less interested in its origins or rationale than in its very appearance. It comes not long after I saw--which means it must have traveled some distance--a tweet by writer Amanda Marcotte, reading:

https://t.co/o8CaFcvsof The process is complete. “Free speech” is now being used primarily, perhaps exclusively, as a right wing code for white nationalism.

Students of law and religion are familiar with this phenomenon, of course, as the phrase "religious freedom" has, since 2014 and peaking around last year or the year before, become increasingly rendered in even more-or-less serious media accounts as "'religious freedom.'" This went as far as its scare-quoting in a statement by the Chairperson of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in a report titled Peaceful Coexistence. The point of this epidemic of punctuation, of course, was to contest particular definitions of or assumptions about the meaning of religious freedom, albeit only in one direction. Contestation is a fine and legitimate thing, and an interesting phenomenon to observe. Of course, it can be done more or less deeply or shallowly. Scare quotes fall decidedly in the latter category. It is simultaneously remarkable and unsurprising to see the phrase free speech start traveling down the scare-quote path. Although it does absolutely nothing to improve clarity, accuracy, understanding, discussion, or justice, I'm sure it will be noted with interest by social observers and greeted with delight by typographers who charge by the character.